November 27, 2015

You're invited to take a (virtual) road trip with IU Press to Santa Claus, Indiana! On December 3, ten of our staff members will be volunteering at the Santa Claus Museum to help answer some of the tens of thousands of letters that arrive in the town every year. You can watch us play elves for the day through our live broadcast on Periscope. Check out our Twitter and Facebook pages that morning for the video link.

We'd also like you to join the fun of reading letters to Santa. Do you know a child who's written a really good letter to Santa? Enter it for a chance to win our new book Letters to Santa Claus! Compiled by "The Elves," this book contains more than 200 letters delivered to Santa Claus, Indiana, from the 1930s to the present.

November 23, 2015

We received an amazing response to the cover photo contest for our crowdsourced book Undeniably Indiana! After reviewing more than 200 photos, we created three possible cover designs for the book. Now it's your turn to help us pick which one will be on the cover! Go to our Facebook page to vote for your favorite using the like button. (Only one vote per person, please.) The voting period ends December 4 at 11:59 EDT. The cover with the most likes will win!

About Undeniably Indiana:

In this first crowdsourced book about Indiana, ordinary Hoosiers from all corners of the state share the eclectic, wonderful, and sometimes wacky stories that are undeniably Indiana. These true tales highlight the variety of Hoosier life—fond recollections of hometowns, legendary tales of the past, Indiana’s unpredictable weather, favorite foods (there’s more than corn!), and chance encounters with unforgettable and infamous people. And, of course, there’s always basketball. Written for anyone who has ever called this great state home, Undeniably Indiana provides the answer to the widespread question “what is a Hoosier?”

November 20, 2015

Today concludes our week-long feature on readings for Jewish Book Month. We hope these books have helped increase your knowledge and awareness of important topics in Jewish studies. Our final set of reading selections covers historical, personal, and fictional perspectives of the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on the Jewish people:

Witnessing the Robbing of the JewsA Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944Sarah GensburgerTranslated by Jonathan Hensher with the collaboration of Elisabeth Fourmont

From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jews—mostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe—were robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz.

When Europe Was a Prison CampFather and Son Memoirs, 1940-1941Otto Schrag and Peter Schrag

In a compelling approach to storytelling, When Europe Was a Prison Camp weaves together two accounts of a Jewish family’s eventual escape from Occupied Europe, avoiding the fate of many other Jews who were sent to concentration camps. One, a memoir written by the father in 1941; the other, begun by the son in the 1980s, fills in the story of himself and his mother, supplemented by historical research. The result is both personal and provocative, involving as it does issues of history and memory, fiction and “truth,” courage and resignation.

This volume, the third in a series of James G. McDonald’s edited diaries and papers, covers his work from 1945, with the formation of the Anglo-American Committee, through 1947, with the United Nations' decision to partition Palestine between Jews and Arabs. McDonald was instrumental in the recommendation that 100,000 Jewish refugees enter Palestine and won President Truman’s trust in order to counter attempts to nullify the report’s recommendations.

Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. Shenker argues that testimonies are shaped not only by the encounter between interviewer and interviewee, but also by technical practices and the testimony process.

Fictional representations of horrific events run the risk of undercutting efforts to verify historical knowledge and may heighten our ability to respond intellectually and ethically to human experiences of devastation. In this captivating study of the epistemological, psychological, and ethical issues underlying Holocaust fiction, Emily Miller Budick examines the subjective experiences of fantasy, projection, and repression manifested in Holocaust fiction and in the reader’s encounter with it.

November 19, 2015

All this week, we're featuring some of our newest Jewish studies titles for Jewish Book Month. Today's reading selections are centered around the theme of Jewish identity:

Jewish Youth and Identity in Postwar FranceRebuilding Family and Nation Daniella Doron

At the end of World War II, French Jews faced a devastating demographic reality: thousands of orphaned children, large numbers of single-parent households, and families in emotional and financial distress. Doron traces emerging notions about the postwar family and its role in strengthening Jewish ethnicity and French republicanism in the shadow of Vichy and the Holocaust.

Imagining Jewish AuthenticityVision and Text in American Jewish ThoughtKen Koltun-Fromm

Exploring how visual media presents claims to Jewish authenticity, Imagining Jewish Authenticity argues that Jews imagine themselves and their place within America by appealing to a graphic sensibility. Ken Koltun-Fromm traces how American Jewish thinkers capture Jewish authenticity and lingering fears of inauthenticity.

In a time of national introspection regarding the country’s involvement in the persecution of Jews, Poland has begun to reimagine spaces of and for Jewishness in the Polish landscape, not as a form of nostalgia but as a way to encourage the pluralization of contemporary society. This volume illuminates the role of the material world in the complex encounter with the Jewish past in contemporary Poland.

In the aftermath of World War I, the largely Hungarian-speaking Jews in Slovakia faced the challenge of reorienting their political loyalties from defeated Hungary to newly established Czechoslovakia. Focusing on "Jewish nationality" as a category of national identity, Klein-Pejšová shows how Jews recast themselves as loyal citizens of Czechoslovakia.

November 18, 2015

All this week, we're featuring some of our newest Jewish studies titles for Jewish Book Month. The two book selections for today focus on Jewish literature and visual culture in the diaspora:

Double Diaspora in Sephardic LiteratureJewish Cultural Production Before and After 1492David A. Wacks

The year 1492 has long divided the study of Sephardic culture into two distinct periods, before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain. David A. Wacks examines the works of Sephardic writers from the 13th to the 16th centuries and shows that this literature was shaped by two interwoven experiences of diaspora: first from the Biblical homeland Zion and later from the ancestral hostland, Sefarad.

This book examines Jewish art and visual culture—art made by Jews about Jews—in modern diasporic settings. Carol Zemel focuses on particular artists and cultural figures in interwar Eastern Europe and postwar America who blended Jewishness and mainstream modernism to create a diasporic art, one that transcends dominant national traditions.

November 17, 2015

Yesterday the White House announced that former Rep. Lee Hamilton is among the 17 recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom. This award is the nation’s highest civilian honor, presented to individuals who have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors. The awards will be presented at the White House November 24.

The White House called Hamilton "one of the most influential voices on international relations and American national security over the course of his more than 40 year career."

All this week, we're featuring some of our newest Jewish studies titles for Jewish Book Month. Today we're focusing on two important Jewish theologians and scholars, Mordecai M. Kaplan and Abraham Joshua Heschel. Kaplan and Heschel were colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, but had different ideas about Judaism. Their religious thought is examined in the following books:

The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan Mel Scult

The founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement, Kaplan is the only rabbi to have been excommunicated by the Orthodox rabbinical establishment in America. Drawing on Kaplan's 27-volume diary, Mel Scult describes the development of Kaplan's radical theology in dialogue with the thinkers and writers who mattered to him most.

Focusing on the idea of transcendence—or the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness—Held puts Heschel into dialogue with contemporary Jewish thinkers, Christian theologians, devotional writers, and philosophers of religion.

November 16, 2015

In honor of Jewish Book Month, every day this week we'll be highlighting some of our most recent Jewish studies titles. Today we're featuring books that are centered around the theme of antisemitism:

Deciphering the New AntisemitismEdited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld

An international group of scholars address the increasing prevalence of antisemitism on a global scale. Antisemitism takes on various forms in all parts of the world, and the essays in this wide-ranging volume deal with many of them: European antisemitism, antisemitism and Islamophobia, antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and efforts to demonize and delegitimize Israel.

European Muslim AntisemitismWhy Young Urban Males Say They Don't Like JewsGünther Jikeli

Antisemitism from Muslims has become a serious issue in Western Europe, although not often acknowledged as such. This study addresses those issues and is rich in qualitative data that will mark a significant step along the path toward a better understanding of contemporary antisemitism in Europe.

Radical French Thought and the Return of the "Jewish Question"Eric MartyTranslated by Alan Astro

For English-speaking readers, this book serves as an introduction to an important French intellectual whose work, especially on the issues of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, runs counter to the hostility shown toward Jews by some representatives of contemporary critical theory.

On the Oregon State University Press blog, author Lawrence Landis describes his process writing A School for the People: A Photographic History of Oregon State University.

Liverpool University Press features an interview with the editor of one of the press's forthcoming open access e-textbooks, Using Primary Sources, which is destined for use on more than 20 taught modules in its home institution.

Minnesota Historical Society Press features Mike Evangelist's Downtown: Minneapolis in the 1970s. Evangelist's photos generated great interest on social media by those reflecting on the many long-lost places and styles featured. The book itself offers a throwback look at this era.

The University of California Press discusses how the first volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain became a media cause célèbre when it was first published five years ago.